A touch long and wobbly but just the thing for alt-finance geeks with background in trading language and practice.
Mezrich delivers a knotty tale of the futures market and its discontents.
At the heart of the story are two characters whom we meet early on: “Vlad Tenev and Baiju Bhatt weren’t household names,” writes Mezrich in prose that harkens to the new journalism of old, “but their product was spreading through households and dorm rooms at an exponential rate, like a phone-born virus powered by pixie dust, exceptional design, and more than a little triggered greed.” The product, arrived at after the two experienced pangs of remorse for “helping rich people get richer,” was an app, Robinhood, that allowed ordinary people to trade on the stock market without brokerage fees (and not much regulatory oversight, as it turns out). One stock that took Robinhood’s interest was coincidentally attracting the attention of hedge fund managers: GameStop, a company that seemed to lack much vision of how to position itself in a video game market that, while its products were digital, required physical players to interpret the software. The managers were betting against it, shorting the stock. The investors who came to the game—Tenev and Bhatt would later be damned for the “gamification of trading”—through the app drove it up to improbable heights, costing Wall Street billions. Mezrich’s story is a tangle, necessarily, since the author has to sort out many threads: the drive to “democratize” Wall Street on one hand, the opposite drive to keep trading out of the hands of amateurs on the other, and more. In the hands of Michael Lewis, the narrative might have been neater, and Mezrich lets a few key terms go by without adequate explication—for example, readers new to the notion of order flow trading may get lost. The takeaway, though, is that life is short and Wall Street complicated. In that world, the winners are few and the losers, legion.
A touch long and wobbly but just the thing for alt-finance geeks with background in trading language and practice.Pub Date: Sept. 7, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-5387-0755-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: July 9, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2021
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
A declaration worth hearing out in a time of growing inequality—and indignity.
Noted number cruncher Sperling delivers an economist’s rejoinder to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
Former director of the National Economic Council in the administrations of Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, the author has long taken a view of the dismal science that takes economic justice fully into account. Alongside all the metrics and estimates and reckonings of GDP, inflation, and the supply curve, he holds the great goal of economic policy to be the advancement of human dignity, a concept intangible enough to chase the econometricians away. Growth, the sacred mantra of most economic policy, “should never be considered an appropriate ultimate end goal” for it, he counsels. Though 4% is the magic number for annual growth to be considered healthy, it is healthy only if everyone is getting the benefits and not just the ultrawealthy who are making away with the spoils today. Defining dignity, admits Sperling, can be a kind of “I know it when I see it” problem, but it does not exist where people are a paycheck away from homelessness; the fact, however, that people widely share a view of indignity suggests the “intuitive universality” of its opposite. That said, the author identifies three qualifications, one of them the “ability to meaningfully participate in the economy with respect, not domination and humiliation.” Though these latter terms are also essentially unquantifiable, Sperling holds that this respect—lack of abuse, in another phrasing—can be obtained through a tight labor market and monetary and fiscal policy that pushes for full employment. In other words, where management needs to come looking for workers, workers are likely to be better treated than when the opposite holds. In still other words, writes the author, dignity is in part a function of “ ‘take this job and shove it’ power,” which is a power worth fighting for.
A declaration worth hearing out in a time of growing inequality—and indignity.Pub Date: May 5, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-7987-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 25, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2020
A satisfyingly heartfelt tribute to a thoroughly remarkable man.
Investigative reporter Franklin recounts the life of the free-spirited millionaire entrepreneur who used his fabulous wealth in the fight to save nature.
One constant in the epic life of North Face founder Doug Tompkins (1943-2015) was his enduring love of the outdoors. The son of a successful antiques dealer, he grew up in the countryside of Millbrook, New York (Timothy Leary was a neighbor), where he cultivated his love of the natural world. His contrarian ways eventually led to his expulsion from high school just weeks before graduation. Tompkins headed West, where he baled hay in Montana, raced Olympic skiers in the Rockies, and took up rock climbing in California. He also “hitchhiked by airplane throughout South America.” Tompkins ended up in San Francisco, where, by the mid-1960s, the skiing and climbing supplies business he started with the help of Patagonia founder Yvon Chouinard suddenly began to boom. He was a charismatic businessman, and every one of his ventures after that—from his wife’s Plain Jane dress company to his own Esprit clothing brand—was successful. But his Midas touch never changed his passion for travel and adventure—e.g., flying his Cessna, sometimes with his family, but often, to the detriment of his marriage, solo. In the early 1990s, Tompkins bought property in southern Chile and fell in love with its pristine beauty. His outrage over the resource extraction–based nature of the Chilean government’s policies fueled his desire to protect the land. In the years that followed, he became an outspoken, sometimes reviled conservationist dedicated to using his fortune to transform thousands of acres of Patagonia into national parks. The great strengths of this timely, well-researched book lie not just in the author’s detailed characterization of Tompkins’ complex personality, but also in the celebration of his singularly dynamic crusade to save the environment.
A satisfyingly heartfelt tribute to a thoroughly remarkable man.Pub Date: Aug. 10, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-06-296412-0
Page Count: 336
Publisher: HarperOne
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2021
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